Details
Auckland
Date: 20th May, 2026
Time: 6pm
Location: Maclaurin Chapel, UoA
RSVP: admin@nzcis.org
Wellington
Date: 13th June, 2026
Time: 9:30am – 2pm
Location: St John’s, Willis Street
Come for a session unpacking Iain McGilchrist’s ideas about how our brains really work and why it matters.
Have you ever wondered why beauty is so hard to find? Why we seem to have quite different ways of paying attention to the world? Have you ever wondered how consciousness works? Or why the brain is shaped the way it is? Have you wondered how we can make a better world?
Dr Iain McGilchrist is a leading UK public intellectual, psychiatrist, and philosopher who has reframed and highlighted the importance of our bihemispheric brains and their quite different ways of paying attention to the world. “He is committed to the idea that the mind and brain can be understood only by seeing them in the broadest possible context, that of the whole of our physical and spiritual existence, and of the wider human culture in which they arise.”
In the Master and His Emissary and The Matter With Things, he has popularised a theory that our civilisation has turned to a particular, focused, abstract, left-hemispheric way of paying attention to the world. We need to recover the right hemisphere, with its more holistic, and emotionally engaged attention. We can’t have the man in person. But we have his lectures on tape, including one he recently gave in London for the Boyle Lecture. This event will include a showing of this lecture, followed by local discussion. In Wellington, there will be local responses from Dr Chris Marshall, Rev John Howell, Matthew Bartlett, and Dr Nicola Hoggard Creegan
Pizza in Auckland
Morning tea and lunch in Wellington
